@Mushorwell - There's also the option of trying LMDE with the MATE desktop environment (or the Linux Mint 13 main edition with the MATE desktop) . Since it's a fork of Gnome 2.32 and does not require 3D graphics it might solve your problems.

"Humph. Choice, it is the quintessential Linux delusion, simultaneously the source of it's greatest strength, and it's greatest weakness." (All apologies to The Architect)

if you want to change gtk style have a look at lxappearance, it's part of lxde but as any lxde component it can be installed separately. it's a must when using minimal window managers or setting up your own environment.

Thank you all for your suggestions. I did try MATE but did not like the big fonts when I change the default theme, I don't know if there is a way of fixing that. I will try to see if I can fix this, I am otherwise getting a liking to lxde, it's so light and fast! Srolling on windows is so smooth I'm just falling for it, I think I might stick with this for the time being, till a new update of cinnamon is available as well as the cinnamon 2D. I am otherwise still looking into eventually moving to a tiling window manager like awesome, I have heard so many great things about it and have had experience with xmonad which is also pretty good. Has anyone else tried awesome on LMDE? It's a real shame about enlightenment, its such a great window manager in its premature state and has got so much potential, I really hope it does pick up.

Mushorwell wrote:Thank you all for your suggestions. I did try MATE but did not like the big fonts when I change the default theme, I don't know if there is a way of fixing that.

There probably is. I have seen nothing of the sort.
I prefer MATE, because it has very good, functional launch panels, like Gnome Classic. One click to start a program - and it's configurable.

Ah, I have sort of resolved my issue with MATE and must say it works pretty much like gnome 2. It's a very good fork and I actually like it now. I however gathered enough courage to get awesome wm and I must say, that is the winner for me!! I installed it simply expecting a tiling window manager that I would use when I'm in the mood to show off my geekyness but after a little struggle with it's installation and managing to add it to my repos, I finally got it running. Even with no configurations it's almost fully functional, very simple to use and to my surprise has got really good mouse support it even functions partly like fluxbox. Unlike xmonad, it has some kind of taskbar with it already and I merely have to just launch the nm-applet and synapse and I'm ready to roll. It's a real pleasant surprise I think I'm actually going to be using this a lot more than any other wm. Just now following tuts on configuring it (not that there's a lot that I want to add, it's already near perfect!! )

if you want to change gtk style have a look at lxappearance, it's part of lxde but as any lxde component it can be installed separately. it's a must when using minimal window managers or setting up your own environment.

I have to say that during the past couple of months I've become very fond of GNOME Shell. It finally clicked with me how to use it and now I find it very appealing. I like to add a few extensions for appearance sake, like removing accessibility icon which I don't use, but otherwise I use it pretty much stock.

I switched from Ubuntu a year or so ago to Mint 11, works great easy inslall, great boot on dual boot Win7 and Mint 11 to both system on 1 tb Hdd split in half. Used manual partition installer on Mint 11 all went well.

I have spent last 3 dayis attempting to install Mint 13 Cinnamon, 32 bit and 64 bit. All installs work but cannot find dialogue in Mint manual Partitioner to, point to home for files. so end up formatting second half of drive and letting installation pick the partition, which it does a terrible job . Put three additional partitions on drive, one a swap and the other two as a 7gb and a 3 gb with it appears the boot files on both. Does not install to the 400 gb. I located the dialogue on the old mint 11 with no problems.
The big problem is all Mint 13 attempts work ok until reboot, Grub is installed but will not boot to system, have to reboot and use recover option to reinstall grub files and when installed, click on resume boot and it loads system until next reboot and again will not boot until files are reloaded by recover mode. Does boot win7 ok.

Now I am not a guru of linux and not a newby either and do not want to get into a whole bunch of string commands, Miint 11 installed and worked right out of the box, mint 13 will not. Same machine same setup except grub on mint 11 is I believe 1.9, while on MINT 13 is 2.0.

How do you expect a newby to intall Mint 13 with all these problems. ?? I like mint 13 but if I cannot resolve, what is the point, as a matter of fact I would use Mint Linux and dump Windows 7 entirely except I use Acronis - Home 10 for cloning and Acronis - Disk Management for Hdd partitioning and for me there is nothing like it.
I have Hdd running under small hardware control interface as they are both SATA 6. I installed Gparted on Mint 11 and it will not even see the drives and even under Ubuntu, I could not work with gparted to do anything, even Microsoft gives Acronis software a 5 point rating so how can I do without it??

I give Clem and his team a salute for a fine system in Mint 13, but one does need to be able to work with it , without all these problems, I might even try to use the boot loader in Acronis to see if it can resolve my problem. Clem I understand the amount of work you and the team put in just give us a good install and please put some easy graphical hdd partitioners that work. Will bookmark this site and check back. Frustrated. EdWh
EdWh

Needless to say I'm yet another xfce user. On mint LMDE before learning Arch linux I used Mate and have a great deal respect for it. the mate menu was nice but on my netbook it had many times a 5 second delay just pulling it up. On xfce I found the layout simple like having an organized context menu. Xfwm does an excellent job as a tiling window manager. which I believe is a reason thunar doesn't do tabs or dualpanes. playing around with the hotkeys I got a hot key for loading 2 instances of thunar side by side. same effect, just a different way of achieving it. Now I don't miss it anymore. I also like xfce's terminal. simple and fast but throw in tilda, customize it, and you'll have something both faster and less on resources than quake that works well on xfce.

Thme wrote:playing around with the hotkeys I got a hot key for loading 2 instances of thunar side by side. same effect, just a different way of achieving it.

Actually, it's not the same effect. In dual-pane mode, the panes are aware of each other, so things like "move to other pane" are possible, and, as far as I know, this is not doable with tiled windows (without maybe relying on some heavy black magic). This is why I can't switch to single pane managers, and why I hate the new (3.5.4+) Nautilus so intensely. If Nemo reaches *any* usable state by then, I'm there. Otherwise, I'll switch to Marlin. Or maybe even SpaceFM.

I have just installed Mint 13 on two machines. I am using Cinnamon on the machine I am typing this reply (which happens to be booted into WinXP at the moment). I am still looking at which Linux I want to use for the long term. So far, of the distros I've tried, I like Mint the best. I had Mint 12 on my newest laptop until yesterday and have uninstalled it so that I may put Mint 13 on it.

I have another older dell with a Core 2 processor and not much RAM (2 Gb as I recall) that Cinnamon would not work on, so I have installed the MATE version on it and it is running okay, but pretty slow. Anyway, I like both MATE and Cinnamon, but will probably wind up with Cinnamon on the laptop (my best computer at the moment).

I haven't been real adventurous lately, but have Mint 13 on two machines.

I like Gnome Shell, with the extensions, it's what I use on my "good" pc. But as for this older one that I am typing from now, it's gotta be XFCE. It runs smoothly, and looks great. I have not tryed Cinn or Mate, maybe one day I will, for now I love my XFCE and Gnome3.

Openbox! i've been using it since before the DE's revolution (gnome-shell, unity, and such) and altough i'm still in the works of having some stuff working (a bit lazy... ), some windows just won't respond to "unlock" buttons or stuff like that, i love it's simplicity.

I have Gnome-shrek installed and also cinnamon for either when someone else borrows my laptop or something doesn't work. Cinnamon looks nice but still fails to me on the wireless networks menu and turning the card on and off (maybe just a driver thing, BCM4322), i'll be looking for updates on it but in the mean time i can just congrat it's team for the work done and hope the good things keep coming.

I am using Gnome2 on Mint9, but hope to upgrade soon to KDE on Mint13.
Laptop was using Mint13-XFCE, but I'm now trying out KDE. If my laptop (dual core2dual at 1.8ghz and 1gb ram ... thinkpad R60) can hack KDE I may switch to that. Might need to upgrade the ram to 2-4gb (cheap enough), otherwise I may go back to XFCE or try out Cinnamon.

zen_monkey wrote:Openbox! i've been using it since before the DE's revolution (gnome-shell, unity, and such) and altough i'm still in the works of having some stuff working (a bit lazy... ), some windows just won't respond to "unlock" buttons or stuff like that, i love it's simplicity.

I have Gnome-shrek installed and also cinnamon for either when someone else borrows my laptop or something doesn't work. Cinnamon looks nice but still fails to me on the wireless networks menu and turning the card on and off (maybe just a driver thing, BCM4322), i'll be looking for updates on it but in the mean time i can just congrat it's team for the work done and hope the good things keep coming.

Cheers!

you can always try to remove the network manager (apt-get remove network-manager, or is called gnome-network-manager) and try to use wicd instead.
though the solution would be a better driver hopefully available in a future release